


out of focus, eye to eye

by kathillards



Category: Kamen Rider Drive
Genre: F/M, Slight Canon Divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-20 03:20:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17014668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathillards/pseuds/kathillards
Summary: "You saved me once. Now it's my turn." (Chase, Kiriko, and quiet moments in the aftermath of an impossibility.)





	out of focus, eye to eye

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Estirose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Estirose/gifts).



> thank you for giving me the opportunity to write about two of my favorite characters! i hope i did them and your prompts even a little bit of justice :)

 

He watches her pour the cup of tea.

She always seems so steady. Her entire body is focused on the task at hand. He listens to the spill of the tea directly into the cup, watches the way she bends over the table. The moonlight through the window catches in her ponytail, makes it gleam silver.

Chase shifts in the bed, and she jumps.

“You’re awake,” says Kiriko. Her voice is shaky. There’s a drop of tea sliding down the edge of her cup. Chase can’t look away from her.

“I am.” He pushes himself up with a strain of effort—far more than it normally should take. “Where am I?”

Kiriko looks at him and where her voice had wavered, her resolve does not. In her face he sees that same steadiness, the resolution of the truth.

“You’re safe,” Kiriko says. It’s been a long time, he thinks, since he’s heard something he could believe.

 

 

 

“It will heal,” he tells her when she tries to check his injuries. “I am not a human. You don’t have to concern yourself with—”

“Shut up.” The irritation in her voice is new; normally, when she visits him she carries her melancholy in her steps. Like the sight of him makes her sad and aching for something—someone—he can’t give her.

Today, her patience seems to have run out.

Kiriko exhales and slowly runs her hand down his arm till it drops off onto the bed. Her touch had been strange and unfamiliar at first, but now it’s like she’s set him adrift.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just—my brother and Tomari-san, they’re being so…”

“Drive and Mach?” Chase supplies. His mind places the names and faces together easily enough, but the emotions that come with them are something new, too. Where once had been cold rage is now…

Kiriko rubs her eyes. “I love them, but they drive me crazy. And with you here…”

Frustration, he places. This is the emotion. Unbidden, his hand comes up and curls around her wrist, stopping her mid-motion.

“I’ll go,” he tells her solemnly. It seems an appropriate solution—if he leaves, she won’t have to worry about them finding him hidden here. It will remove her stress. And he can go back to the Roidmudes.

(Strange, how even the thought of that—once it would have been comforting, and now it provides only a swell of dread.

He doesn’t think much of these emotions, and still they tangle up inside him, hotwired into his circuitry without any way to cut them out.)

“No,” says Kiriko, so forcefully that she startles him into loosening his grip. “You can’t go. You’re still injured. You nearly _died_.”

“But I’m alive,” Chase points out. “It’s not your responsibility.”

 _I am not your responsibility_. The words sit in between the two of them, Kiriko staring at him like he’s reached inside her and rearranged her heart in her chest.

Then she sets her mouth in that stubborn, determined look. He’d seen it before, when she threw herself in front of his shot, or when she hauled him off the street where he lay dying and dragged him here. Even half-conscious, he had remembered that look.

 _Try and stop me_ , she might have said, if anyone had been there. _You can’t_.

“You saved me once,” is what she says now, and she presses her hand to his chest till he falls back onto his pillow. “Now it’s my turn.”

 

 

 

 

He has to leave. He knows he has to leave.

The longer he spends languishing away in Kiriko’s safe room, the higher the possibility gets of the Roidmudes doing something truly terrible in his absence. If he’s not the Reaper, someone with less mercy will be. And the longer he stays in here…

The more he thinks he might not want to be the Reaper any longer.

Every night, he plots his escape routes. Out the window, over the street, into the stillness of the evening. Far, far away from her.

Kiriko brings him something every night, and every night he stays.

“Soup is good for you,” she tells him tonight. “Try some.”

“I’m not much for human food,” Chase admits. But the bowl she places in front of him smells good. Onions and carrots and cheese. At least his sense of smell is working fine.

“You’re in a human body,” Kiriko says. “Just eat.”

She pulls up her chair in front of him and gets her own bowl of soup from the carton. Chase watches her for a minute instead of attempting to eat, studying the way she dips her spoon into the soup, how her brow furrows at the first taste of it, the tangle caught in her hair from what must have been a hasty brushing.

She doesn’t seem tired, but he thinks she should be. There’s a bruise on her forearm, and a cut on her collarbone. He wants to lean across and smooth it over, like he can heal her as easily as his body heals itself, but he can’t.

Sometimes, Kiriko looks at him like she wouldn’t mind if he gave into these human impulses. If he gave into the pounding memories trying to break free of that locked door in his mind. Sometimes, he thinks she might even want him to give in.

But Chase has never been one for giving in. Never been programmed for it. So he sits and eats his soup instead.

 

 

 

When he finally leaves, he does it before she gets there. Has to, really. Can’t figure out how to say goodbye without knowing what he’s saying goodbye to.

What he hadn’t expected—what he should have—is that she would come after him.

“Kiriko,” he says with a breath that falters in his throat. Such a strange feature of the human body, to be knocked sideways by just one sight. Just one girl. “Why are you—”

“You remember, right?” Kiriko asks, stepping closer by one, two steps. One, two. Chase starts counting to keep himself steady. “You remember what happened that night.”

He remembers—he remembers the rain. The lights flashing. The scream.

Remembers taking her in his arms, remembers the rescue. Doesn’t remember the emotions that came with it. Maybe there had been none. Maybe he had only ever been this—a robot in dysfunction. Maybe she’s always been projecting her own feelings onto him.

But somehow, that doesn’t fit right.

“What I remember or not doesn’t matter,” says Chase, and the words should sound more firm than they do. “I have to go back.”

Kiriko shakes her head and stomps forward. One, two, three. Four, five. She’s face to face, eye to eye. All that stubbornness, and all that fear. He tries to lift his hand, but finds it shaking too much.

“Fine,” she says. “Go back. I’ll find you again. Just tell me something.”

Chase hesitates. “Yes?”

“Why did you do it?”

“Why did I save you?” A hundred answers run through his mind. “I was programmed to save you.”

Kiriko pushes herself up and forward and her lips press against his in a kiss so warm, so brief, he thinks he might have imagined it. When she pulls back, her cheeks are flushed but her mouth is still set the same way.

“Then why did _I_ save you?” she asks him. There’s a note of desperation in her voice that makes his heart clench—like she’s begging him to give her a reason, any reason, why she did what she did. Why she went against her team. Her brother. Everything she knew. “I’m not programmed to do anything.”

“I suppose that is… the difference between us,” Chase says. His voice feels faraway, like it belongs to someone else. He supposes it does, really. Some human, who might understand this better. “You can do what you want to do.”

 _This_ , this terrible emotion that chokes him up from the inside out. He couldn’t remember ever feeling anything so deeply. Couldn’t remember feeling anything at all, really. Remembers seeing the delight in Heart’s smile or the jealous twitch of Brain’s eyes, and wishing to have what they had. One emotion. Only one.

Looking at Kiriko now, he thinks he might have overshot. This isn’t one emotion. This is a thousand emotions running the wrong code inside him. A malfunction in his systems.

“What do _you_ want?” Kiriko presses. She doesn’t kiss him again. He wonders if he wants her to.

His head tips forward and this kiss—this one is an answer where the first one had been a question. He _did_ want her to. He does want her to. He thinks this might have been the itch under his skin since he woke up in that bed with her watching over him. This longing, this ache, this great and terrible _wanting_.

He’s never wanted anything before. He’s never wanted anything like this. Anything this much.

“I don’t… understand,” Chase murmurs, when the kiss ends. He’s left holding her in his arms, her hand curled into his shirt as an anchor, his breathing rough and uneven. Unsteady. Uncertain. “I don’t know what I want.”

This, he thinks, when she slides her arms around and pulls him into a hug. _This_ is something he could want. This quiet moment, in the starshine, in the dust. The forest all around them. Kiriko warm and steady and _here_.

“Then just stay,” Kiriko breathes. “And we’ll figure it out.”

He hasn’t had anything to figure out in a long time, but he thinks—this might be worth it. This might be something he does want.


End file.
